Adventure International

~ the last words ~

This company filed for bankruptcy protection when i was a toddler in ankara, so there is no version of this grave where i tell you what it was like. My first machine arrived a decade after the last Adventure International disk shipped, and the first thing i ever typed into a computer was not a two-word command. Everything below is reconstruction. It is here because almost every commercial thing that happened afterward in games ran through a decision Scott Adams made in 1978 about what would fit in memory.

He had played Colossal Cave Adventure on a mainframe, the way everyone in that story starts, and wanted it on the TRS-80 sitting in his house. People told him it was impossible. The machine had sixteen kilobytes to work with and the original game was written for a computer several orders of magnitude larger. His answer was to split the problem: an interpreter that understood a two-word grammar, and a data file holding the rooms and objects. The game became data, and the data was small.

Adventureland came out of that in 1978. Thirteen treasures scattered through a fantasy landscape, reachable with a verb and a noun. No pictures. He and his wife Alexis started selling it themselves out of Longwood, Florida, on cassette tapes in ziplock bags with a photocopied sheet inside. There was no retail channel for home computer games in 1978 because there was no business yet. Adventure International was the business being invented in real time.

~ the record ~

~ the two-word parser ~

GET LAMP. GO NORTH. That grammar looks primitive next to what Infocom would do with full sentences a few years later, and it was, but it was also the reason these games ran on everything. The interpreter was small enough that the same data files could be moved onto an Apple II, an Atari 800, a VIC-20 or a Sinclair with a rewrite rather than a rebuild. Adams shipped across more machines than anyone else in the period, and he did it because the design started from the constraint instead of fighting it.

Alexis wrote most of Pirate Adventure, the second game, which makes her one of the first women credited on a commercial computer game. In 1982 the SAGA line put pictures on top of the same engine, Scott Adams Graphic Adventures, mostly drawn by an in-house artist named Kem McNair. The pictures were not the point and everybody knew it. They were what you needed on the box to keep selling in 1982.

~ the marvel deal ~

By late 1983 Adventure International had around fifty people and was publishing work by more than three hundred outside programmers, which made it a real publisher rather than one man's catalog. Revenue was reported around three million dollars. Then came the deal that looks brilliant on paper: a license from Marvel for a series called Questprobe, superhero adventure games with a shared plot running through them.

Three shipped. The Hulk and Spider-Man came out in 1984, Human Torch and the Thing the year after. A fourth, an X-Men game, was in production when the money ran out. The problem was never the license. After the 1983 crash the low-end games market filled up with cheap product and cash flow got thin, and the company had been paying for its visibility with advertising bought on credit from computer magazines. Scott Adams Inc filed chapter 11 in december 1985.

~ what replaced it ~

The copyrights went to the bank, and years later they came back to Adams, who released the games for free. That is a quieter ending than most companies get. The games are still playable now, on interpreters people wrote from the original data format decades after the format stopped mattering commercially, which is a kind of afterlife that depends entirely on having been small.

What Adventure International proved is the thing the industry then spent forty years re-learning. You do not need the powerful machine. You need to find the representation that fits the machine you have. Thirteen treasures in sixteen kilobytes, sold in a plastic bag, is a better description of the founding of an industry than most of what got written about it later.

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